A Different Kind of Remembrance Day

The last few years, I've made a habit of putting up a thoughtful post on Remembrance Day, a post reflecting on the past, on The War. To me, as I learned it from my parents and their generation, The War always refers to World War II. 1939-1945. As if there had not been any other war in the decades previously or since. The scars it left were so deep, even seventy years and two generations later they still hurt.

But this year, I don't want to talk about The War. Because this year, on Remembrance Day weekend, I was engaged in a remembrance of a different kind: I got to go to the 80th birthday celebration of a dear aunt of mine. It was a wonderful party: over eighty people jammed into her daughter's house, eating, talking, laughing, hugging my tiny little aunt who was walking through the crowd of her friends with a great big smile on her face...

Laughing - did I mention laughing? We laughed so hard we had tears running down our faces. Her four granddaughters put on a skit, poking fun at some of her traits. One of the girls acted "Oma", complete with her coat, slacks, shoes, the wig she wore when she had chemotherapy four years ago, and her thick German accent. The funniest bit bar none was when the play "neighbour" talked to the play "Oma", discussing her propensity for making friends with anybody and everybody (that very propensity which was responsible for the crowd of 80+ guests).
"I know you like getting to the mail box at the right time so you can talk to the mail carrier, don't you. You probably even know her name - what's she called?" says the "neighbour".
Play "Oma" replies: "Oh, her name is Jane!"
"No, it's not," interjects the real Oma quite positively, "it's Michelle!"

It was wonderful to celebrate the life of this little woman whose eighty years on this earth have by no means been easy. From having to flee wartime Poland as a child to a bout of cancer in her seventies which we all thought would kill her, through personal difficulties and health struggles, she carried on, and poured out love around her wherever she went. Some of that love was palpable in my cousin's house this past Sunday, flowing back in waves from her children, grandchildren and many, many friends towards this small, grey-haired, smiling person in the turquoise blouse.

It was a Remembrance Day of a different kind, and it was a great blessing to be part of it.

Brother Mine

I remember this book I read when I was a kid. No, that's not quite correct: I remember one scene out of this particular book. I don't remember what the book's title was, or any of the rest of the story but this one scene which burned itself on my memory.

The story is about a girl, I think her name is Elsbeth or Lisbeth (it's quite possible that the author was Elisabeth Dreisbach, and the story was somewhat autobiographical. She wrote quite a bit for the publisher who put out the book - and I can't remember the publisher's name either. We just had a lot of their kids' books in the house; they were small and had a yellow back cover.).

Elsbeth is around 11, or maybe 13, and lives on a farm outside of Düsseldorf - no, I think it was Wuppertal. It's wartime. Elsbeth, her father, and her little brother set out on a few days' visit to relatives in the city. Mother is worried - what if there's a bombing raid while they're there? Father reassures her: nobody is going to bomb Wuppertal; the enemy is not interested in that small city. So they go.

No sooner do they arrive at their aunt's flat in town, that Elsbeth's little brother throws a big tantrum: he wants to go home, he hates it here! Father is not impressed, and won't give in. He's come to visit with his family, and visit he will. Elsbeth enjoys her cousin, and her uncle, but she is particularly taken with her aunt, her father's cheerful, charming younger sister.

In the evening, father and aunt sit down at the piano together, and sing a duet, a beautiful, melancholy folk song:

"Sister mine, sister mine, when shall we go home?"
"When the cocks crow early in the morn,
Then shall we two go home,
Brother mine, Brother mine, then we shall go home."

In the night, Elsbeth has a dreadful nightmare of fire and flame and her mother calling to them. She runs to her father, she begs him to please, please take them home that day, not to stay over another night as they had planned. "Oh, not you too! I thought better of you!" Finally, extremely reluctantly, father gives in, angry and disappointed at having his time with his sister cut short by his children's caprice, and takes them back to the farm.

That night, they hear the drone of the bombers flying overhead, and watch from their farm on the hillside as fire rains down on Wuppertal, destroying everything. Their aunt, uncle, cousin - all dead.

"Sister mine, sister mine, you step grows so weak."
"Seek out my chamber door,
My bed beneath the floor,
Brother mine, slumber fine shall I evermore."

Wars kill.

Lest We Forget.

The bombed-out interior of the Stiftskirche in Stuttgart, 1945 (from a photo in the foyer of the church)

Sepia

It's the 11.11.11 today. That's a lot of 1's in a row. It's also Remembrance Day, and this year, I'm wearing the poppy.

Remembrance Day tends to be shrouded in sepia, with splashes of red (the poppies). We remember the men - and less often, women - who fought in the wars of the 20th century, wars which, for the most part, happened more than a lifetime ago. My uncle who fell in Russia would be ninety years old now, my uncle-in-law who was left on the fields of Normandy when he was nineteen would have had his 87th birthday this summer. Or, most likely, would not have; none of his siblings lived much past 70.

I remember hearing a story of someone who described how in the 1970's he first saw Cuba, which he had only known from TV footage up to that time. His big surprise was that Cuba was in colour! All the photos and films he'd seen were black-and-white. The stories we tell on Remembrance Day tend to be in sepia tones, stories of long ago and (for North Americans in particular) far away. We forget that all those things happened in colour, were here-and-now for those who lived then.

We also forget that when we are in the midst of things, when we experience them in colour, so much that happens seems inevitable, as if there was nothing we could do about it. I'm a pacifist at heart, but really, my dedication to peace has never been put to the test. I suspect that in actuality, I'm a passivist - I just want to be left alone to live my life, to not be bothered.

And that's were Remembrance Day comes in. I can live my life in peace because of those who were not passivists. I can live in a society where it is unacceptable to disparage someone because of their skin colour, thanks to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. I, and my daughter, can hold property, can obtain university degrees, can vote, thanks to Emmeline Pankhurst and Nellie McClung. And I can sleep at night without fear of bombs dropping on my head because of those who fought the sepia-coloured wars, and those who fight today for our freedom from violence and injustice.

Nothing says it better than the old greeting of the Christian liturgy: "Pax vobiscum - Peace be with you". "And also with you."

Poppy Conflict

Here it is again, the week of Poppy Conflict. Every year, this happens. Most people around me are wearing the red poppy to keep Remembrance Day. And I- I avert my eyes from the young cadets with their poppy trays in front of the drugstore, and sidle by, trying not to be noticed. Why? Because the language that goes with wearing the poppy says that "Let us remember those who fought for our freedom!" Well, according to that statement, my family fought against freedom. My uncle fell on the Russian front (aged 22), my grandfather was killed by an allied bomber (leaving a widow with four children under nine years old, the youngest a newborn), my uncle-in-law was left on the fields of Normandy (he wasn't even 20). Lest we forget. If wearing the poppy means honouring the veterans who "fought for freedom", then would it not also mean dishonouring those who fought against them- whether they wanted to or not?

To be honest, it's the language that gets me. The rhetoric of honouring the sacrifice of the allied soldiers of World War II. Don't get me wrong- PLEASE don't get me wrong. I honour the men and women who fought in the wars, who sacrificed their lives- if not literally by dying, then by spending years of their lives separated from their families, having to endure the horrors of combat and the pain and tedium of Prisoner-of-War camp. That, too, is a sacrifice of one's life.

No, it is not that that which, up to now, has kept me from wearing the poppy. It's that the language of heroism still permeates Remembrance Day. They "fought for our freedom". Yes, they did. But they hardly had a choice. Their country went to war, and so they marched. As did those on the other side. Do you think my grandfather wanted to leave his pregnant wife and three small children to look after the farm alone? He died because he was a farmer who could not swim. In an air raid on his army base, he tried to run for shelter and drowned in a pond he had not seen in the dark. The bomber pilot- American, English, perhaps even Canadian- who flew the raid, was he any more of a hero, any more of a freedom fighter than this man who had no interest in politics, who just wanted to be left alone to live his life- but was on that army base because he had no other choice? The pilot, too, had no choice. Both of them lost their lives, in one way or another, to forces greater than themselves.

Yes, there was much heroic action on both sides of the war. And some of that action was on the part of a woman who, on Christmas Eve 1944, was confronted by two army officers delivering the news of her husband's death, and who kept the news to herself for another day so as not to spoil her young children's Christmas celebration. Countless acts of heroism, by countless humans all over the globe, caught up in forces beyond themselves. Remembrance Day, for me, is about remembering what happened, reminding ourselves of what still is happening, so that we never again allow those forces to build to such a point.

The fight for freedom is not the fight for the political supremacy of any one country, of any one ideological system. It is the fight for freedom from those forces that catch up all of us, and compel us to lay down our lives; the fight for the freedom of the human race.

I might be able to wear the poppy, after all. Lest We Forget.